Disaster Recovery No-Nos for CPA Firms

CPA firms are prime cybercrime targets because of the confidential financial information they hold. Whether it’s tax season or not, they need to make sure that information stays safe and secure. That means having a good disaster recovery plan.

Most small businesses don’t have an adequate disaster recovery plan because they just assume that disasters outside of fires or natural disaster will never happen to them. These businesses are defunct within a year or two if they undergo a significant disaster they are not prepared for.

However, some CPA firms feel that they do have a solid disaster recovery plan, only to find out when it’s code red that they left some very important things out. Here are some common pitfalls that accounting firms need to avoid when planning around disasters.

Being Lazy and Getting a Generic Plan

Disaster recovery plans are not the same for every industry. An accounting firm has different priorities than a law firm or hospital. There are off-the-shelf plans you can buy, but they are very barebones and do not cover the specifics of what a CPA firm needs to do when faced with a major disaster, natural or digital.

Not Planning for Small Disasters

This is a common problem because when most people, not just CPAs, think of disasters, they think major, cataclysmic events that could immediately bankrupt their business. So while they plan for fires, tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters, they don’t plan for smaller-scale events that can add up and be just as damaging.

Disasters like ransomware attacks or fires are critical and should be planned for, but most of the downtime that CPA firms face are a cause of human error and smaller system failures. It doesn’t sound like much, but the amount of lost revenue from downtime that can accrue from not properly preparing for it can be deadly.

Never Updating the Disaster Recovery Plan

Your IT infrastructure probably changes pretty frequently. With software and hardware upgrades, as well as new machines and work applications, a disaster recovery plan from two or five years ago can become pretty useless if a disaster were to happen today. Make sure your update your disaster recovery plan often!

Did you know that you can store your disaster recovery plan, as well as any backups you may want, in the cloud? It’s much safer and saves you a lot of money. If you’d like to learn more, visit the TOSS C3 website and call us anytime at 1-888-884-8677!